Episode Details

In this week’s podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts), let’s look at Eight aspects of this week’s White House visit which other experts have not focussed on.

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So our topic is Disinfolklore and everything we've been seeing in our information space this week about Disinfolklore. Much of it has been focused on this White House meeting and the Alaska meeting, which we talked about a bit last week and the owner talked about last week. A great take on it. But also, disinfolklore is an analytical method to parse Russian MAGA and other forms of disinformation. So it's a set of lenses through which to perceive, appreciate, analyze and parse disinfolklore.

So I wanted to quickly look at eight different aspects of the White House. Let's aggregate information. the entire system, the entire complex of stories, much of which is Disinfolklore, related to this week's antics as the White House visit.

So first I wanted to Quickly, I think many of us understand this, perhaps people who don't, who aren't, who haven't been focused on the war on a daily basis since February 2022 won't really understand this, the people Randy would refer to as low information people.

But this meeting was a turning point in the context, looking at it from the long durée, as many of us have been doing and as I have certainly since working in eastern Ukraine around the time of the first impeachment and all the events running up to the first impeachment, including the Perfect Phone Call.

And if we remember the perfect phone call that led to Donald's first impeachment, the part of the quo, so the quid, was that President Zelensky announces an investigation into Hunter Biden, who had and has never even been to Ukraine. And the quo was twofold. One was that Donald would stop holding up, I think it was about $270 million in Javelin missile systems, and also would grant President Zelensky a White House visit.

So that is what the entire impeachment was about, and it was about the deal to secure that White House visit.

We all remember the, well, some of us might remember the December 2019 meeting in Paris, where basically Macron and Merkel and Putin put the squeeze on President Zelensky in the Elysee Palace. And Putin had been trolled into visiting Paris, believing that he would convince or that he would walk away from that meeting with the right to hold elections in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, specifically Luhansk and Donetsk.

And there were documents circulated about three weeks, four or five weeks before that meeting, which had been signed by Andre Yermak. And this gives us some idea of the depth of their experience in dealing with all of these issues. And those documents... did suggest that some compromise was going to be made.

And then there was the No to Capitulation movement in Ukraine. Many of the meetings I attended in my capacity as a diplomat monitoring the situation. I was very quickly convinced these were organic, Maiden-like protests. And they made it very clear to me that President Zelenskyy, whatever they were planning, he did not have the power to give Russia any... any capitulation. And that was before the full-scale invasion.

So just the idea that now the Ukraine would capitulate, it's just, it's for the birds. But of course, low information people don't understand that or people who think they can use Disinfolklore to change reality don't understand that.

So then we flash forward to the February 2025 visit, which most of us will remember the trauma and probably remember where we were - I was in an airport when I saw that and my heart sunk when I just saw the photographs coming out of that meeting.

Here we are this week with President Zelensky at the White